Kebabs put the kaibosh on stimulating day
The lot of those in small business bears comparison to the rural lifestyle – long hours, poor or non-existent wages, a certain narrowness of political outlook. And the capacity to complain.
Here are the highs and lows of my Saturday.
The working day began at 8.20am. A ringing phone interrupted an atypical sleep-in. With posted hours of 10am to 10pm, one could have been forgiven for ignoring it. However, when you live on site, there is always the chance that the call is personal. Better safe than sorry.
A sharp, bright voice began with an apology. The customer, a woman of a certain age, had anticipated an answer phone.
Regathering herself quickly, she began to explain. She had read a book about someone called Daisy Bates. The name meant nothing to me. Apparently, Bates was an amateur Edwardian anthropologist. Wedded to Darwinian ideals of survival and fitness, this ‘‘Great White Queen of the Never Never’’ believed Australia’s first peoples were on their way out.
It was her self-appointed mission in life to ‘‘smooth the pillow of a dying race’’. Between 1912 and 1928 she chose to reside in Ooldea, on the edge of South Australia’s Nullarbor Plain, next to the route of the thenunder-construction transcontinental railway.
Living among the Aboriginals, she was well placed to prevent sexual relations between them and the railway workers. Her fear of miscegenation rivalled that of a Ku Klux Klansman.
Full of information on the life and times of Bates, my customer’s actual inquiry was film-related. According to the source material before her, Katharine Hepburn was cast in a 1970s biopic of Bates, one to be directed by that artistic polymath Sir Robert Helpmann. Frankly, I was sceptical. Boasting a working knowledge of the Hepburn filmography, I was unaware of such a project.
A flurry of internet searching proved us both correct. Despite a much-remarked-upon likeness between subject and actress, the film was never made. Outside a 2002 documentary, the only Australian big screen classic of relevance is Breaker Morant.
It turns out that prior to being Mrs Bates, Daisy was Mrs Morant, widowed when her husband was infamously executed for shooting unarmed prisoners during the Boer War.
You learn something every day. However much the conversation led to a dead end, it was a stimulating way to begin the working weekend.
True, you cannot rent out a film that does not exist, but what of it? Given the customer’s warmth and chatty demeanour, this was a secondary consideration. A human connection was made. Such things transcend profit.
Thirteen-and-a-half-hours on, as closing time approached, I was distracted. One eye took in events in the United Arab Emirates, where Black Caps battled Pakistanis, the other busied itself with shop affairs.
Ten pm came and went. Two minutes later, without prelude or foreshadowing, a strange noise was heard in the stairwell. A rustling sound. Innocuous, really.
Needing to close the doors anyway, I investigated. Not quite every stair had been covered in rice, meat and sauce, but you could not fault the effort. Two white polystyrene trays, containing the balance of the kebab meals, sat upended in the midst of this debris.
It required a moment to process and mentally reconstruct what had happened. A person or persons had stood at our entranceway, supper in hand, then, with as much meanspirited energy as they could muster, thrown both trays up the stairwell. The contents had spilled out, spraying the goodness of Middle Eastern cuisine to the four corners.
Conscious of stepping upon the food and making things worse, I descended carefully. A quick reconnaissance of the street revealed no suspects. The kebab anarchists had vanished. There were no tell-tale trails of hummus or even a squashed piece of baklava signposting the escape route.
What could have motivated this senseless act? A vendetta against me personally or DVD rental shops in general? A political statement about meat-eating? Ironic, given the kebabs would have had to be first purchased.
Was it a dadaist action, critiquing capitalism? If so, why not target a profitable business?
The perpetrators were likely drunk or bored or both. They made a mess because they could. Did they laugh at the thought of me spending the next 45 minutes cleaning it up or were they indifferent to consequences, capable only of enjoying the act itself? What would Daisy Bates make of it all?
Place them low on the evolutionary tree and confidently predict extinction.